The problem with any change or reform of the publishing system is that publications are so important for the individual scientist. A paper isn't just a neat way to disseminate results. They are your work evaluation and your CV; they are keeping the score as it were. Where you publish and how often you publish directly determines where - or if - you work another year or two down the road.
And even a short paper takes a lot of time and effort to write. For an informal "don't do that; we tried and it didn't work"-email to a colleague you could just jot down three or four paragraphs after lunch. Make a paper out of it and you have weeks or more of work ahead of you - looking up other previous published reports on the same kind of experiment; doing your best to figure out and explain the exact causes; square your (lack of) results with the apparent success of other groups that did something similar; make neat, clear graphs and illustrations as needed; get formal permission from your lab and your funding agency (and your co-authors labs and funding sources) to actually publish the thing. Then revise and edit the paper multiple times after comments from your co-athours and reviewers.
So, getting good publications is vital for your ability to make rent and buy food for your family. Writing publications take a lot of time and effort - time that is pretty limited. So, even though the will to spread the word on a negative result may be there, chances is, writing it up will be relegated to the "when I've got a bit of spare time"-pile, where it will likely sit until well after retirement.
Like you I need a Linux machine for work-related computing-intensive work, so I assembled one last fall. I use a decent quality MicroATX case with the Gigabyte MA785GPMT motherboard and the Phenom 2 X4 955. Add 8Gb of memory, a drive and you're set. I was going to add a separate graphics card at one point but so far I actually use the on-board graphics, with the 2d-only free drivers. I don't need speedy graphics for showing terminal output and static graphs after all.
The system came in cheap, it's really quiet and it's surprisingly speedy. True, it's barely half the speed of the 8-core Xeon machine I have at work - but at only an eighth of the cost.
My only advice is, don't go too cheap on the case. That's the single most important part for determining the noise level, and there's nothing so irritating as having a constant high-pitched whine from under your desk all day long.
This isn't about censorship, this is about denying countries we don't like access to our technology.
Just because the servers happen to sit in the US doesn't happen it's US technology. Many Open SOurce projects and man of the individual contributors are not from the US, and the US doesn't have any particular legal right to claim that as their own.
Time to look at Scandinavian hosting sites methinks.
Personally the whole concept of the "Male" and "Female" designs boggle my mind, why is it that one with the balls gets the one with the bar?
It's a local cultural thing. We had that distinction in Sweden too, while here in Japan everyone uses step-through or halfway-bar type bikes (like mountain bikes) for normal everyday use. High-bar bicycles are only for racing bikes used by people dressed in bright nylon tights and oddly-colored sunglasses.
[agh, accidental click on the post button, and no edit]
BTW, one-two miles to the bus station. About 2 kilometers or so? That you can walk in 20 minutes? No need for a bike, just use your legs. I walk longer than that to the local train stop every morning and night.
So, you vote in people that will make Houston friendly for bicycles. Or you relocate to somewhere that is friendly for bicycles. Or you stay resigned to using a car for every trip, eating up more and more of your salary as gasoline and other expenses increase over time.
"If the NYT and WSJ can go and stay non-free, it will be a matter of time before the BBC and the Telegraph and the Register and CNN go non-free as well."
BBC - and the equivalents, such as SVT in Sweden, NHK in Japan, and so on - are public broadcasters. They are not allowed to charge for content, nor is it in their interest to do so (they'd not get to keep most of the money anyhow). They, and their websites, will stay open no matter what. I guess NPR in the US would be in a similar situation.
And the more papers go non-free, the larger the readership - and the advertising revenue - at the remaining free ones.
"Anyway, maybe it's me, but I don't see "easy" per se as a advantage. I prefer efficiency. And more often than I like it, easiness seems to mean less efficiency."
And sometimes it means more.
The main issue with the interfaces to systems like emacs, or LaTeX or git (the old one; the current interface is not bad) is that they are only really efficient if you use the tools all the time. If you use emacs all day, every day then the interface is probably fine. I constantly use LaTeX and so it's really much more effective for me than a graphical typesetting-type application. If all your software lives in git repos and you work with them most days of the week then it soon becomes second nature.
But many people don't use their tools every day. I'd say that every single one of us have some tools that we do use and do like, but we simply don't need them every day or even every week. And when you're an occasional user, no matter how "power" you are, the kind of cryptic interfaces these tools have become a hindrance, not a help. The UI is not discoverable - it's not clear how to do things you may want - so when you don't use it all the time you forget how to do even simple, common tasks.
You end up spending your time searching the web or grep:ing your own shell history to remind yourself how you do stuff, and the efficiency goes straight out the window.
"So use it more often" isn't an answer. These are tools, not something you use just for their own sake. If you don't need to, say, write a report more than once every three months then you're certainly not going to create the occasional bogus document just so you don't forget how to do things in LaTeX.
So depending on the task, more than on the user, these interfaces can be a help or a major hindrance.
"Gnumeric and AbiWord, on the other hand, are actually usable."
+1 on Gnumeric. It's the best spreadsheet app I've used (and I tend to use a lot of numerical and symbolic math stuff for work).
AbiWord, on the other hand, does have some potential, but they're still missing fundamental features like the ability to actually write using CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) scripts, something just about every other app of any kind out there can handle by now.
I hope that the Chinese exports to the US do not mean the USA loses all control of the technology behind the venture.
Just like when US exporters give out their technology to their buyers so they can control the technology.
You know, a good test of whether an idea like yours really is reasonable is to simply reverse the terms in your mind, and ask yourself, in this case: "self, if the US was exporting turbines to China, would I be fine with giving them the know-how and have China control the technology?"
If, in your mind, it does sound reasonable, then it quite possibly is. If not, then it's not.
"I work in the fields I love, and I'd recommend it to everyone else."
But "Do what you love" is not the same thing as "Do what you love as your primary means of support". Making your passion into your career will frequently kill the passion, smothering it under layers of paperwork, meetings, customer contacts and any other not-fun but necessary aspects of work for money.
Decide beforehand if you're ready to lose your hobby or passion in the process of making money from it. Afterwards it's too late.
"So while it would certainly be easier, better, more convenient and arguably more morally just to go to any of the 49 other lanes - legally, you'd be in the wrong if you did."
When it comes to news, the other 49 are just as legal. There is no benefit - moral or otherwise - for me to go to a pay site for news over going to, say, the BBC, NHK, NPR or SVT or any other public service website, or to the New York Times, Dagens Nyheter, Asahi Shinbun or any other of the thousands of completely legal and moral free to read commercial news websites out there.
Large corporations are not good citizens and care little about the welfare of the nations that created them.
Um, most citizens are not good citizens then. And if a corporation shifting their focus to foreign markets is somehow unpatriotic, do you feel the same about individuals doing the same?
I have left my country of birth - the country where I I grew up and got my education - to work and live in a different country. I still like my old home, and I still "do business" there, but my work is certainly mainly benefiting my current country.
Am I being unpatriotic? If so, are foreign students staying in the US to work and live also being unpatriotic?
..if a growth of irreverence helped put an end to candidates' nervous dependence (in posters, etc) on complete vapidity, so much the better.
If only that was the only reason. The thing is, all aspects of the election campaign is very tightly regulated in law. I mean, ridiculously so - did you know that there is a maximum number of explanatory pamphlets each candidate is legally allowed to print and distribute, and that the limit is just a fraction of the number of eligible voters in their districts? The posters all look the same because that's the only design allowed by law. There's no online discussion because no candidate may update their website or other online presence during the campaign period (each update counts as a publication attempt). And non-candidates trying to distribute info, like pamphlets, can and do get arrested and prosecuted (a monk was sentenced for trespassing a couple of years ago for trespassing when he'd distributed political flyers to people's mailboxes).
The candidates do the pointless "Vote Tanaka! Tanaka, please!" with speaker vans, and the smile-and handshake thing because it's the only legal way they can campaign.
Ah yes: "In constituency X, conservative machine politician A leads conservative machine politician B. In constituency Y, conservative machine politician Q leads conservative machine politician P."
I was nodding off before I reached any "depth".
You're doing him a disservice. His district-by-district overview isn't meant to be read right through; if you have an interest in a particular race (say, for the district where you live) you can look it up there to get the quick summary.
If you look through his normal fare it's well-reasoned, detailed and written very well, quite without the kind of hyperbole and unwarranted conclusions that people like, well, I tend to engage in for cheap points.
If that happens it would be remarkable, given that the party (MinshutÅ) expected to win is a spin-off from the LDP. Like the LDP it consists of factions, and the two that are by far the largest back members (Hatoyama and Ozawa) who started off in the LDP. Better to think of it as LDP Lite.
Actually, whatever the faults of the DPJ (and they are legion), there is a great deal of value simply in changing ruling parties at all. The nearly unbroken rule is by now bad for Japan and bad for the LDP as well. They're so enmeshed with the bureaucracy (and the bureaucracy so politicized) that they really can't change themselves or the current system any more.
For real in-depth coverage (and I mean in depth) in English, check out Tobias Harris' blog here: http://www.observingjapan.com/
ps. The Happiness Realization Party is really quite insane. They want preventative nukes and predict Atlantis will reappear in 2400 once the US (but, note, not Canada or Mexico) sinks into the ocean, at which point Martin Luther, Jesus and aliens from outer space will return to earth. That kind of thinking par for the course for a religion of course, but somewhat outside the mainstream for a political party. ds.
And parts made in Japan to get governmental support to have JAL and ANA buy the plane. Airbus is doing similar things, and both Boeing and Airbus are setting up assembly plants in China to be able to sell more planes there.
You know those "Buy American/Buy Japanese/Buy Whatever" slogans and campaigns that protectionists are bandying about? Those are the reason. If you can sell your big-ticket product in a market only if you actually make at least part of it there, then make it there is what you have to do.
"Buy SomePlaceOrOther" isn't actually saving anybody any jobs at all. The end result is about the same as without, except now everybody is paying more for their goods since production is less efficient with plants placed for political and trade reasons rather than for efficiency.
"Ah, but the downside of the 380 is that you have to redesign the airports to take advantage of it. Otherwise it takes literally an hour to get everybody on and off."
Japan uses 7x7 airplanes with five hundred seats for some national routes. The redesigns for accomodating that number of passengers isn't great - split ramps with two exits rather than one - and the hardware is readily available. Unloading takes a few minutes. Even with one exit it would not take more than ten minutes. "literally an hour" is simply false.
I don't hate it. I just don't see the point. It seems to try to fill a convenience gap somewhere between walking on one end and bicycles or scooters on the other. At least for me there's simply no gap there to fill.
Agree on this. Yahoo is much better than Google for Japanese language search (and Google translate is a sad joke for Japanese; even when I take the time to read through the Japanese original I can often still not make sense of the English "translation"). There's going to be a lot of unhappy people here if they manage to bork that up.
I have no problem with this as long as I can continue to override the font selection and minimum size to something I want.
That, by the way, is great, and more people should try it. Every web page is consistent because every page has the same, easy-to-read type, with a minimum size that puts no strain on my eyes. And very, very few sites break if you do this now that most use CSS - I haven't actually encountered a sites that breaks in a long time. Add adblock and flashblock, and you have a very clean, consistent surfing experience.
The Japanese place is called Hashima island, but popularly called "Gunkajima" - Battleship island, due to the high walls making it look like a huge battleship from far away.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with any change or reform of the publishing system is that publications are so important for the individual scientist. A paper isn't just a neat way to disseminate results. They are your work evaluation and your CV; they are keeping the score as it were. Where you publish and how often you publish directly determines where - or if - you work another year or two down the road.
And even a short paper takes a lot of time and effort to write. For an informal "don't do that; we tried and it didn't work"-email to a colleague you could just jot down three or four paragraphs after lunch. Make a paper out of it and you have weeks or more of work ahead of you - looking up other previous published reports on the same kind of experiment; doing your best to figure out and explain the exact causes; square your (lack of) results with the apparent success of other groups that did something similar; make neat, clear graphs and illustrations as needed; get formal permission from your lab and your funding agency (and your co-authors labs and funding sources) to actually publish the thing. Then revise and edit the paper multiple times after comments from your co-athours and reviewers.
So, getting good publications is vital for your ability to make rent and buy food for your family. Writing publications take a lot of time and effort - time that is pretty limited. So, even though the will to spread the word on a negative result may be there, chances is, writing it up will be relegated to the "when I've got a bit of spare time"-pile, where it will likely sit until well after retirement.
Like you I need a Linux machine for work-related computing-intensive work, so I assembled one last fall. I use a decent quality MicroATX case with the Gigabyte MA785GPMT motherboard and the Phenom 2 X4 955. Add 8Gb of memory, a drive and you're set. I was going to add a separate graphics card at one point but so far I actually use the on-board graphics, with the 2d-only free drivers. I don't need speedy graphics for showing terminal output and static graphs after all.
The system came in cheap, it's really quiet and it's surprisingly speedy. True, it's barely half the speed of the 8-core Xeon machine I have at work - but at only an eighth of the cost.
My only advice is, don't go too cheap on the case. That's the single most important part for determining the noise level, and there's nothing so irritating as having a constant high-pitched whine from under your desk all day long.
Well OK; religious, then.
Just because the servers happen to sit in the US doesn't happen it's US technology. Many Open SOurce projects and man of the individual contributors are not from the US, and the US doesn't have any particular legal right to claim that as their own.
Time to look at Scandinavian hosting sites methinks.
It's a local cultural thing. We had that distinction in Sweden too, while here in Japan everyone uses step-through or halfway-bar type bikes (like mountain bikes) for normal everyday use. High-bar bicycles are only for racing bikes used by people dressed in bright nylon tights and oddly-colored sunglasses.
[agh, accidental click on the post button, and no edit]
BTW, one-two miles to the bus station. About 2 kilometers or so? That you can walk in 20 minutes? No need for a bike, just use your legs. I walk longer than that to the local train stop every morning and night.
"Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem."
So, you vote in people that will make Houston friendly for bicycles. Or you relocate to somewhere that is friendly for bicycles. Or you stay resigned to using a car for every trip, eating up more and more of your salary as gasoline and other expenses increase over time.
"If the NYT and WSJ can go and stay non-free, it will be a matter of time before the BBC and the Telegraph and the Register and CNN go non-free as well."
BBC - and the equivalents, such as SVT in Sweden, NHK in Japan, and so on - are public broadcasters. They are not allowed to charge for content, nor is it in their interest to do so (they'd not get to keep most of the money anyhow). They, and their websites, will stay open no matter what. I guess NPR in the US would be in a similar situation.
And the more papers go non-free, the larger the readership - and the advertising revenue - at the remaining free ones.
"Anyway, maybe it's me, but I don't see "easy" per se as a advantage. I prefer efficiency. And more often than I like it, easiness seems to mean less efficiency."
And sometimes it means more.
The main issue with the interfaces to systems like emacs, or LaTeX or git (the old one; the current interface is not bad) is that they are only really efficient if you use the tools all the time. If you use emacs all day, every day then the interface is probably fine. I constantly use LaTeX and so it's really much more effective for me than a graphical typesetting-type application. If all your software lives in git repos and you work with them most days of the week then it soon becomes second nature.
But many people don't use their tools every day. I'd say that every single one of us have some tools that we do use and do like, but we simply don't need them every day or even every week. And when you're an occasional user, no matter how "power" you are, the kind of cryptic interfaces these tools have become a hindrance, not a help. The UI is not discoverable - it's not clear how to do things you may want - so when you don't use it all the time you forget how to do even simple, common tasks.
You end up spending your time searching the web or grep:ing your own shell history to remind yourself how you do stuff, and the efficiency goes straight out the window.
"So use it more often" isn't an answer. These are tools, not something you use just for their own sake. If you don't need to, say, write a report more than once every three months then you're certainly not going to create the occasional bogus document just so you don't forget how to do things in LaTeX.
So depending on the task, more than on the user, these interfaces can be a help or a major hindrance.
"Gnumeric and AbiWord, on the other hand, are actually usable."
+1 on Gnumeric. It's the best spreadsheet app I've used (and I tend to use a lot of numerical and symbolic math stuff for work).
AbiWord, on the other hand, does have some potential, but they're still missing fundamental features like the ability to actually write using CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) scripts, something just about every other app of any kind out there can handle by now.
Just like when US exporters give out their technology to their buyers so they can control the technology.
You know, a good test of whether an idea like yours really is reasonable is to simply reverse the terms in your mind, and ask yourself, in this case: "self, if the US was exporting turbines to China, would I be fine with giving them the know-how and have China control the technology?"
If, in your mind, it does sound reasonable, then it quite possibly is. If not, then it's not.
But "Do what you love" is not the same thing as "Do what you love as your primary means of support". Making your passion into your career will frequently kill the passion, smothering it under layers of paperwork, meetings, customer contacts and any other not-fun but necessary aspects of work for money.
Decide beforehand if you're ready to lose your hobby or passion in the process of making money from it. Afterwards it's too late.
"So while it would certainly be easier, better, more convenient and arguably more morally just to go to any of the 49 other lanes - legally, you'd be in the wrong if you did."
When it comes to news, the other 49 are just as legal. There is no benefit - moral or otherwise - for me to go to a pay site for news over going to, say, the BBC, NHK, NPR or SVT or any other public service website, or to the New York Times, Dagens Nyheter, Asahi Shinbun or any other of the thousands of completely legal and moral free to read commercial news websites out there.
Um, most citizens are not good citizens then. And if a corporation shifting their focus to foreign markets is somehow unpatriotic, do you feel the same about individuals doing the same?
I have left my country of birth - the country where I I grew up and got my education - to work and live in a different country. I still like my old home, and I still "do business" there, but my work is certainly mainly benefiting my current country.
Am I being unpatriotic? If so, are foreign students staying in the US to work and live also being unpatriotic?
If only that was the only reason. The thing is, all aspects of the election campaign is very tightly regulated in law. I mean, ridiculously so - did you know that there is a maximum number of explanatory pamphlets each candidate is legally allowed to print and distribute, and that the limit is just a fraction of the number of eligible voters in their districts? The posters all look the same because that's the only design allowed by law. There's no online discussion because no candidate may update their website or other online presence during the campaign period (each update counts as a publication attempt). And non-candidates trying to distribute info, like pamphlets, can and do get arrested and prosecuted (a monk was sentenced for trespassing a couple of years ago for trespassing when he'd distributed political flyers to people's mailboxes).
The candidates do the pointless "Vote Tanaka! Tanaka, please!" with speaker vans, and the smile-and handshake thing because it's the only legal way they can campaign.
You're doing him a disservice. His district-by-district overview isn't meant to be read right through; if you have an interest in a particular race (say, for the district where you live) you can look it up there to get the quick summary.
If you look through his normal fare it's well-reasoned, detailed and written very well, quite without the kind of hyperbole and unwarranted conclusions that people like, well, I tend to engage in for cheap points.
Actually, whatever the faults of the DPJ (and they are legion), there is a great deal of value simply in changing ruling parties at all. The nearly unbroken rule is by now bad for Japan and bad for the LDP as well. They're so enmeshed with the bureaucracy (and the bureaucracy so politicized) that they really can't change themselves or the current system any more.
I wrote up a summary of the parties and issues at play in the current election here: http://janneinosaka.blogspot.com/2009/07/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about.html
For real in-depth coverage (and I mean in depth) in English, check out Tobias Harris' blog here: http://www.observingjapan.com/
ps. The Happiness Realization Party is really quite insane. They want preventative nukes and predict Atlantis will reappear in 2400 once the US (but, note, not Canada or Mexico) sinks into the ocean, at which point Martin Luther, Jesus and aliens from outer space will return to earth. That kind of thinking par for the course for a religion of course, but somewhat outside the mainstream for a political party. ds.
And parts made in Japan to get governmental support to have JAL and ANA buy the plane. Airbus is doing similar things, and both Boeing and Airbus are setting up assembly plants in China to be able to sell more planes there.
You know those "Buy American/Buy Japanese/Buy Whatever" slogans and campaigns that protectionists are bandying about? Those are the reason. If you can sell your big-ticket product in a market only if you actually make at least part of it there, then make it there is what you have to do.
"Buy SomePlaceOrOther" isn't actually saving anybody any jobs at all. The end result is about the same as without, except now everybody is paying more for their goods since production is less efficient with plants placed for political and trade reasons rather than for efficiency.
"Ah, but the downside of the 380 is that you have to redesign the airports to take advantage of it. Otherwise it takes literally an hour to get everybody on and off."
Japan uses 7x7 airplanes with five hundred seats for some national routes. The redesigns for accomodating that number of passengers isn't great - split ramps with two exits rather than one - and the hardware is readily available. Unloading takes a few minutes. Even with one exit it would not take more than ten minutes. "literally an hour" is simply false.
I don't hate it. I just don't see the point. It seems to try to fill a convenience gap somewhere between walking on one end and bicycles or scooters on the other. At least for me there's simply no gap there to fill.
Agree on this. Yahoo is much better than Google for Japanese language search (and Google translate is a sad joke for Japanese; even when I take the time to read through the Japanese original I can often still not make sense of the English "translation"). There's going to be a lot of unhappy people here if they manage to bork that up.
I have no problem with this as long as I can continue to override the font selection and minimum size to something I want.
That, by the way, is great, and more people should try it. Every web page is consistent because every page has the same, easy-to-read type, with a minimum size that puts no strain on my eyes. And very, very few sites break if you do this now that most use CSS - I haven't actually encountered a sites that breaks in a long time. Add adblock and flashblock, and you have a very clean, consistent surfing experience.
"Oh, good, I stand a relatively good chance of being able to stop myself before rolling into traffic."
Which is why the brake is controlled with the breathing tube.
"Polaroid is trying to bring back the instant photo, in the form of a small digital camera/printer that can instantly print your digital photo."
Fuji is making instant film; they've never stopped. You can get Fuji film formats for your Polaroid cameras.
The Japanese place is called Hashima island, but popularly called "Gunkajima" - Battleship island, due to the high walls making it look like a huge battleship from far away.
It's normally completely closed off for visitors, but photographers and artists are occasionally allowed access. An excellent photo series here: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/saiga/yuji/gallary/menu-e.html